Offline Advertising for Local Community Website - Question!

In my experience, the only way to really hit this hard is FTF or direct sales until your site is "all the rage" in the local community, and a must have item for advertisers. Then you can self enroll with a CC and let them manage their own ads with the right kind of software.

I'd try flyers at first. They're simple to make, relatively cheap (depending on how fancy you want them) and most businesses wouldn't have a problem with them. Newsagents or supermarkets especially usually have some kind of billboard. Or you can just stick them up in the windows of shops.

Best to test the waters with something that's not a huge cost. That way, if it backfires, you minimise your losses. If it works, move onto bigger things.

Okay Allen, I will let you in on a few of my secrets. I've built local community websites since the mid 90s. To give you an example, one site that I built in a community of around 8000 in a county of 48000 did 3,000,000 unique pageviews per year.

Controvery sells. Therefore, get political. Create a discussion forum and then start topics pertaining to whatever local issues your community is facing. Register a bunch of seed accounts to ghost write responses. Fill out your content over a few weeks time. Just make sure that YOU as the admin do not ever take a position on the controversy.

Start emailing your local government offices to get the employees looking at it. Government staff is the silent third political party in the US. ALL politics affect them in some fashion. Your topics will go viral in your local community as the bureaucrat workerbees cut and paste links in their offices.

Create all the obligatory FB accounts, etc... with facebook pages for your site. Back in the early days, we used Classmates.com to contact all the students in all the school districts in the local area.

MySpace & Facebook make it really easy now.

Also hit the forum for your local community on a site called Topix.com. You can promote your site on their forum.. as they are not actively moderated. In fact, if the local editor position is available for your community, you can register and control this - becoming the guy that manually syndicates the cut and paste links to local news sites onto Topix (which is owned by some mega news media partners).

It takes roughly 50 regularly active users for a community to become self-sustaining.

At the same time, you are not going to make a sustainable business out of selling directory placement or ads only.

You absolutely MUST integrate direct response into your site. Meaning, that you create a membership registration that is required for site users... and then get the local advertising merchant to create a coupon or discount that is only available on your site.

With the right software, you can track who (which registered members) is accessing the coupon, and provide the list to the advertiser for backend followup. Of course, you must be completely transparent to the users, but if the offers are bonafide and substantial, they don't care. Provide them with real value. Provide your advertisers with true "list building" services built into your framework without requiring them to have all the toys on their own site.

If you do this, you will soon have more web clients than you can handle who want to pay you to do their site in a response marketing fashion with whatever tools you use for your own portal.

I don't know your business model or what technology you've used to do your site, but if you IM me, I can point you in some directions that will really make your head spin.

Which one can be more profitable? Offline or Online?

Allen, I'd go the direct mail route with a mailer or package that stands out in an a distinctive way from regular business mail. There have been numerous discussions in here about how to make your direct mail stand out, so I won't go into it here.

Paul